Could Room 101 be defeated?
by crimethinker
Summary: Once a person has been taken into the Ministry of Love, nothing can stop their conversion to Ingsoc. Even when they have been released, they could not go back to their old ways - at least, not without extensive outside help. So... what if?
1. The Past Comes Calling

Disclaimer: I do not own Nineteen Eighty-Four or anything else that George Orwell put in his book, but I own the other concepts and characters.  
  
I give permission to others to use this, change this and complete this fanfiction how they wish, provided they do it purely for fanfiction and don't make money out of it for anyone, and they acknowledge exactly what words were my work at the beginning/end of their fanfiction. (Translation: I'm hinting that I might be too lazy to finish this fic, and I will want someone to do it for me.)

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Winston Smith opened the door to his apartment, entered, and closed it, cutting himself off from the celebration outside. He would also have celebrated Big Brother's achievement at increasing the chocolate ration to fifteen grammes and solving the razor blade shortage problem, but he had been working frantically recently to correct Big Brother's grammatical mistakes in speeches he had made regarding the war with Eastasia, and he was very tired indeed. He put his coat on the table and strode towards his kitchen, in order to have some Victory Gin before going to bed. 

He was suddenly aware of something acutely wrong, and he stopped walking. It was too quiet. And he could feel something: he thought about it for a second, trying to place it, then he realised it might become crimethink (a thought contrary to Big Brother), and so he quickly did crimestop (to deliberately forget any thought that might cause one to not love Big Brother). He took another step forward, and stopped. It was as though his head was itching, yet he knew it was not.

Suddenly, completely out of the blue, came a thought:

**You do not love Big Brother.**

Winston felt scared: he could not let this rogue thought get to the telescreen. At the same time, he did another crimestop, and wiped the slate clean. But instantly, the thought reappeared.

**You do not love Big Brother. No one loves Big Brother.**

He quickly forgot it again, and began striding more purposefully towards the kitchen; the doorway to it was only four feet away. But he could not escape the thoughts.

**They made you think you loved Big Brother - but you do not. You never did. Remember Aaron-**

Winston forgot the thought even as it materialised. Goldstein was trying to break into his mind. He smiled. Goldstein would never win. Big Brother was just too good.

Right then, something was wrenched out of his head. He staggered from the queer feeling of hundreds of synapses firing completely of their own accord. He searched his scalp: there was nothing missing. He then realised he no longer knew what crimestop was.

Something else was ripped away, leaving a slight feeling of nausea. He had no idea where this room was. He cried out. He knew he needed Big Brother now. He would probably be punished for thinking these thoughts, but only Big Brother could stop them. And to get Big Brother, he needed the telescreen. He ran into the kitchen, yelling as his varicose ulcer throbbed from the friction. He put his face inches away from the telescreen.

The woman on the telescreen was frozen. He now realised why it was so quiet: she was not speaking, not moving.

"Help me!" he said in desperation to the telescreen. "Big Brother! In your mercy, help me!" The woman did absolutely nothing. He realised she was not just failing to move, but her hair, which usually fluttered slightly, was stock still. The image on his end, not her at her end, was unmoving. Which meant Big Brother could not see him, and could not help him.

"NOOO!" he shouted. Then there was another wrench, and he forgot who Big Brother was. He still knew the words Big Brother and crimestop, but not their meanings. He sobbed: Goldstein was winning the battle against his mind.

His mind experienced continuous pulls and scratches, and he realised most of his memory was being destroyed. He lost the meaning of Anthony Goldstein, thoughtcrime, thinkpol (the Thought Police), all of the Ministries, and what he soon came to realise was everything that binded his love to Big Brother, although he didn't remember who Big Brother was. He had long since fallen over from this onslaught. He could no longer stop the wave of sick that was washing over him, and he vomited all over his floor.

Suddenly, he lost the memory of all the words that he had lost the meanings of. He searched for them, but they had been wiped out of his mind completely.

Instantly, it all stopped. He had complete control of all of his synapses now. He searched his memories. He could vaguely remember there being a war on, altthough he didn't know who was involved. Besides that, a lot of his mind was now empty. Except for his selfish impulses. He stood up and began walking around in confusion, wiping vomit off his face.

He could remember the kind of food that O'Brien and other Inner Party members ate, although he didn't know who O'Brien was or what the Inner Party was, and could only barely remember that he wasn't in it. Why couldn't he have such food?

He remembered the taste of black-market coffee. Why couldn't he have refreshments like that all the time, instead of it almost always being Victory Coffee? By the same token, he mentally compared real cigarettes to the crumbly kind that he usually had. Why did he have those? What was to stop him having the good ones all the time?

He looked around his apartment. The prevailing smell of his apartment was the powerful smells of his own or, more generally, other bodies. Everything was dirty, because it took too much energy for him to keep it clean. Did he really have to live in such squalor?

"No," said a man as he opened the door to the apartment. "You don't have to."

"What?" asked Winston, turning. The other man looked very muscly and fit as he walked backwards into the apartment, with his head turned towards where he was going. His face was unshaven and he had a scar on his jawline. His stubble, thick eyebrows and short hair were all brown, and he was carrying one end of a heavy six-foot long, three-foot wide, thick black bag in both hands. He entered the apartment, and another man was carrying the other end of the bag. Between them they carried it easily.

"You heard what I said," said the man. "I was answering your thoughts." Winston looked startled. "Yes, I can read your thoughts. I am plugged in to them through a device in a vehicle outside." Winston looked astonished. "It is how the people in the Ministry of Love convinced you that you loved Big Brother - by deleting your previous thoughts and shoving in some new ones. I see here that you do remember your stay in the Ministry of Love." Winston looked offended. "Hey, the only way we could get you to hate Big Brother again was to delete the propaganda they filled your brain with. Yes, I will tell you who I am eventually. For now, all you need to know is that you are being removed." Winston looked even more offended, then determined. "Six. Eighteen. Blue. Julia's lips. Oranges and lemons, says the bells of St. Clement's."

"Get out of my head!!" screamed Winston.

"Fair enough," shrugged the man, handing Winston a little electronic box. Winston looked at the display: it was deactivated. "Whatever you do, don't look at your own thoughts. The Thought Police killed dozens of proles because they saw their own thoughts, when they were testing the device in the 1960s. They don't know how it kills people, but it probably has something to do with infinity." Both men finally reached Winston's bed with the bag, one took out a knife and cut open the bag, and they both unceremoniously dumped its contents onto the bed.

Winston screamed again. The bag had contained him, dead. "What the hell is that?" he said, his breathing and speech irregular from fear.

"This? This is a fake dead body," he said. "Come on, it's time to leave." He began dragging Winston with him. Winston didn't resist at first, but once he was out of his apartment he began thrashing wildly, breaking the electronic box over the head of one of the men. Both men were individually stronger than Winston, and one of them took Winston bodily down the stairs and outside while the other went into the next room.

"Who are you and what are you doing here?" he shouted. "Where are you taking me?"

"We are the Resistance," said the man. "We are freeing you from Big Brother."

"It doesn't feel like being freed!" Winston continued.

"Of course it doesn't," said the man. "Memory alteration always produces irrational fear afterwards."

"Why are you taking me?" gasped Winston.

"Because it's time you left the rule of Big Brother," said the man. "Believe me, you'll be living better without him. Now shut up, we're about to go outside. Don't make me gag you."

"Who is Big Brother?" demanded Winston. "Where are you taking me? Tell me!"

"God dammit, I don't have time for this," said the man. "Look, I'm taking you to a better place. Now eat this." He stuffed a large woollen sock into Winston's mouth, then dragged him out of the building. His eyes burned from the bright light outside, compared to the dark interior of the building, before he was thrown into the back of a truck, and the darkness swallowed him whole.  
  
ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo  
  
"Where is this?" yelled Winston, the instant he'd woken up. "Who are you?"

"I told you, we're the Resistance," said the man that had kidnapped Winston. "It has been around since before the Ingsoc party came into power, even, although all of the original members are dead, and there is currently only one member who has been with us for over a year and lived."

Winston was lying on a hard wooden bench twice as long as he was tall, in a square room made of dull grey material. The bench reached one side of the room to the other, along one wall. There was a wooden door in the far corner or the room to where Winston lay, and next to it was a metal chair, sat upon which was the man that had taken him from his apartment.

"What the hell is Ingsoc?" said Winston, sitting up quickly.

"You remember we altered your memory?" asked the man.

"Very well!"

"Well, right now, you shall learn again what Ingsoc is. You shall relearn Big Brother, doublethink, thoughtcrime, all the things we caused you to forget at an accelerated rate. You shall do so from the very same textbooks that current children learn about Big Brother from, and you shall read all the news. In theory, learning it from those sources would help you trust us to not to brainwash you, but since they are altered constantly by Big Brother, it won't make much of a difference."

"Why have you taken me?" asked Winston.

"Because this room has no telescreen in it, and neither do any of the other rooms." Winston remembered how telescreens always intruded into his life, and usually chastised him for not going to social events or not doing enough toe-touches in time, and decided this place couldn't be as much of a prison as his apartment. His outlook became less complaintive.

"In addition, this building is lined with lead, fifty feet underground, because we believe that Big Brother is developing a device to read people's minds at range, in order to seek out and destroy creative thought. We brought you here so you can have creative thought without there being a chance of Big Brother finding you and altering your mind again."

Winston tried to take this all in. "So, Big Brother is bad? You're trying to protect me from Big Brother?"

"In my opinion, yes."

"And you made me forget everything about him, just so you could teach it to me again? What's the point? What difference will it make?"

"The difference is the brainwashing. We will give it to you without telling you it's the truth, and without forcing you to make speeches to others about his greatness, and without coercing you to go on a march that promotes Big Brother, ad nauseum. We will also give you our version of history, which you will find is a polar opposite of their version. We have no proof, because it's all been hunted down and destroyed or altered, but hopefully you'll find it more believable than their version."

"By 'their' you mean 'of Big Brother and his workers and supporters', right? And what if I find their version of events more believable?"

"I read your mind back in the apartment. You're not a stupid person, and only a stupid or brainwashed person would believe the stuff they force- feed the young people these days. I shouldn't be saying this, because you might later think it's brainwashing, but their version of events reads like a children's fantasy fiction. Not to mention their version of history's evidence is all controlled by Big Brother, which essentially means their version of history is as proofless as ours."

Winston thought about this. "It is equally possible that they have taken control of historical proof to stop the likes of you, i.e. kidnappers, altering it. And that they convince children of Big Brother's superiority out of love for them, to stop them from being convinced otherwise, to some evil way of thinking that would be wrong and damage them or others."

"Quite right," said the man. "I believe that Big Brother is evil from what I have seen, but you have never seen or heard of Big Brother's actions according to your memory, so you can't judge anything. The whole point is for you to make up your own mind. If we forced our opinions on you, we would be no better than them, and if we did nothing, you would always be loyal to Big Brother. Do you at least understand our motives for taking you?"

He thought for a moment. "Plainly," said Winston. "Whether you're telling the truth or not about wanting to help me, you're trying to convert my way of thinking, and you couldn't do that while Big Brother was watching. And then you faked my death," said Winston, remembering. "That way, Big Brother wouldn't look for me."

"And you understand why I will not let you leave?" he continued.

"No!" said Winston, shocked, but he soon worked it out. "Because you think I would tell Big Brother where you are and have you destroyed."

"Exactly," agreed the man. "Understanding is the first step to trust, but unfortunately we have to treat you as a security risk until you are truly one of us. Now, before I give you all the information on Big Brother and Ingsoc there is, I will do two more things, with the aim of trying to get you to trust me." He pulled out a gun, walked over to Winston and thrust the gun onto his forehead, face set in a grimace of violence.

Winston gave a little shriek and scuttled away down the bench. The man followed him. This continued until Winston was wedged in the corner, with the man barring all means of escape, and creating a groove on his target's forehead with the gun muzzle. Winston was shaking uncontrollably, adrenalin sloshing around his arteries, with his heart beating twice as fast as normal.

The man took the gun off Winston and shot the bench three times, the sound echoing so fast in the close metal-lined walls, it was as though each gunshot actually took the half-second both men heard them, to occur. Then, incredibly, he forced open Winston's hand and put the gun handle into his palm.

"There, my trust exercises are finished," said the man. Winston was still scared from the near-death experience, shaking like a leaf in a gale, face white. "Damn, that wasn't good," he muttered to himself. "Sorry about that, I'm no good at getting people to trust me. You understand why I did that, right? I could have shot you, but chose not to? Yeah? Now, you can keep that gun, as well, and I'll give you more ammunition when I get hold of some. Damn, sorry. I'm really bad with people, I've alway been better with machinery and objects and animals. I shouldn't have done that. Goodbye for now, I'll get the literature. Yeah. Sorry." He left, with Winston crouching on the bench clutching the gun, staring blankly ahead.

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**Author's note**: I burn in jealousy when my other fics get no reviews, and other people get a dozen per chapter or more. So review! Even if you're just gonna say I'm undermining the meaning that George Orwell gave his masterpiece and I ought to die for it, or if you're asking me whether brown shoes go well with jeans, or if you want to know what the chemical structure of propane is, review!


	2. Living in a Big Metal Box

The original author's notes still apply.

Note to one of my reviewers: this is set soon after 1984, using the interpretation that Winston stays alive (it can be interpreted that Winston is shot right at the end of the book). So maybe you were incorrect, Winston has visited the Ministry of Love, and Room 101. Not in this story, of course.

Note: This chapter is kinda boring and reflective, depending on your mood etc, but I'll try to add in an exciting subplot as the next chapter, I promise.

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A Newspeak dictionary flew across the cell-like room and crashed into the lead-lined outer wall, closely followed by a children's textbook about the pre-Party period (now the Party was claiming it invented the practise of tarring wooden ships).

"I'm sick of this!" shouted Winston at the man that took him from his home, whom he now knew was named Frederick. "All these textbooks, all these sources, are exactly the same! They spout the same rhetoric each time of Big Brother being loving and omnipotent, with very little information in between! Is that what you wanted to do? Bore me to death with this - this crap? Why do you make me read them all? Can't you just get on with it and tell me who you are and what your mission is? It's been a week, damnit!"

Frederick, who was sitting on the same metal chair, smiled knowingly. "Listen to yourself, Winston. You sound like a teenager. A complaintive, angsty little teenager." Winston froze at the thought. "And you want to know why? One reason: your food."

"We've been feeding you the same food that they feed the proles. It has two effects, concerning your attitude, anyway. One effect: it's so inadequate that you become constantly irritable. The more sinister effect: they have added enzymes into it, which have the eventual effect of causing you to think at younger and younger ages. It's not permanent, and it will wear off after your next meal, if your meal doesn't contain the enzymes."

"Why did you feed me that, then?" Winston asked.

"For you to feel the effects," said Frederick. "It's a testament to how stupid Big Brother's version of events is that even with the thinking-age-reducing drugs affecting your critical thinking, you can still tell it's a load of lies."

"I've never felt that before," said Winston.

"It's a very subtle effect," said Frederick. "Also, you've almost never had the drug before, either. It's only in the prole food. Sometimes Outer Party types like yourself buy the prole food, but with such minimal dosages as once in three days or less, it has no effect at all, as it was designed to. They wouldn't want the Outer Party members thinking like ten-year-olds, after all: you would be unable to do Big Brother's bidding well."

"Not that there aren't any drugs in Outer Party food, or even Inner Party food. In both foods, as well as black market food that is stolen (rather than illegally manufactured) and prole food, there are additional drugs that reduce critical thinking ability over time. We've been killing the enzymes in those drugs with highly specialised viruses in your food, so you keep your critical thinking for this period in your life, except the effects of having your mental age reduced to what our mind-scanning equipment estimates is 17 years old."

Winston tried to take this in. It had been a week since they had dumped so much information on him at one time: the Big Brother literature was hardly interesting or packed with information. He could feel his head inflating as the holes were filled again with thought, towards a finite maximum. Finally he came up with a question.

"Why do they use temporary drugs to stifle our thought? Why don't they alter our consciousness entirely? The latter would make our current actions impossible: you would be unable to try to convince me that Big Brother is wrong, and I would be unable to make a conclusion from any evidence you gave me, no matter how conclusive. Why not do that?"

"That is some of the most heavily guarded information in Big Brother's scientist networks," explained Frederick. "The only scientists that do anything with human consciousness are either as greedy as him - sorry, you might later think that's brainwashing, I apologise, it's my opinion - or are incredibly stupid and utterly believe in Big Brother's version of Ingsoc. We've never gotten a spy that far in before. Our best guesses are that either they absolutely cannot alter our consciousnesses permanently, or they couldn't do so without altering their own consciousnesses as well. Do you understand so far?"

"Yes," said Winston.

Frederick looked around. "By the way, where is your gun?"

Winston swallowed. The gun was under the bench, in the same corner that he had cowered in a week ago. He was terrified of it. Whenever he tried to rationalise the fear he felt at its sight or even at the thought of it lying there, all he could come up with was a thirteen-inch-long, fat furry horror with teeth like razor blades and a penchant for warm blood and aqueous humour...

"I really scared you, didn't I?" intoned Frederick in regret. Winston nodded. "This fear of yours is too great a weapon against you. Before you learn who we are, we will rid you of your fear."

"How will you do that?" asked Winston.

"Easily," he said. "You never realised it, but we've been reading your mind for the last week, trying to establish what your greatest fear is. Looking at your sojourn in Room 101, you are afraid of rats." Winston flinched. "Do you know why you are so scared of rats?" Winston shook his head.

"Well we do," he smiled. "We will force you to relive the memory that has caused you to be so frightened of rats. You will see that they are not the ones you should be frightened of. Watch."

Frederick sat in silence for a second, then suddenly Winston's vision was torn in two. He yelled as he was blind, then suddenly he saw himself lying on his back. It was a four-year-old version of himself, he remembered, for the other him had his mouth open, and Winston counted the number of teeth in his mouth.

It was during an attack from either Eurasia or Eastasia. He was in a prole shack, one corner of which was ablaze. About twenty rocket bombs had fallen, three in the near area, hitting his house. He wasn't sure where his mother or his sister were. He could see himself partially trapped under rubble, as his frail, tiny limbs tried to push it away. Fortunately, although it trapped him, it was not supporting itself on him, which would have killed him quickly: it looked like two of the walls had fallen around him, and that it weighed at least four tons altogether.

Suddenly a rat appeared on the rubble above him. Winston sucked in his breath sharply, although the younger image of him didn't notice it immediately, and when it did he was impassive. Until the rat began scrabbling over his chest towards his face with its sharp claws, puncturing the skin. Winston felt his heart rate double, and he started sweating. The boy cried out and tried to brush it away. It clung on and continued moving. When it was on his face he closed his eyes to protect them.

Right then the building collapsed completely all around him. The older Winston closed his own eyes then to protect them from the ensuing cloud of dust and dirt, only to discover he didn't have to: the memory he was reliving was only an illusion, and that despite the sights and sounds he was sensing, he was still sitting on that bench in the underground bunker with Frederick at his side.

"Yes, I'm still here," said Frederick, just behind where the young Winston appeared to be.

Winston looked at himself, lying there. He was screaming and screaming with his eyes tight shut. The building coming down had luckily missed him for the most part, but some rubble had come down and crushed the rat on his face, as well as his left cheekbone and the skin around his left eye, making him bleed. He screamed even more when a falling nail rammed into his scalp, barely missing the bone and passing straight through the hair and skin. He began bleeding much faster. Instead of just screaming, he began screaming, "I'm going to die! I'm going to die!"

And Winston understood. He had his eyes closed since the rat walked across them, and he had been deafened by the detonation of the rocket bombs, so the only sense left for him to tell what was happening was touch. Therefore, he had no idea that a shack had just fallen on him. He saw a rat crawling onto his face just before he closed his eyes: he thought the rat had detroyed his face around his left eye, and ripped his scalp apart. He thought he was going to die from it, because he could feel the flow of blood on his shoulder. In that instant, his mind related rats to death.

His sight was split in two again, and again it vanished only for it to return again, this time back in the bunker. He was soaked in sweat, shivering, with his heart beating wildly. Frederick was watching him closely.

"I'm not afraid of rats," Winston realised. "I'm afraid of death."

"Very good," said Frederick. Winston sat deep in thought. Then he spoke.

"How did I survive my head getting split open like that?" he mused.

"Your mother came back, found you, and bandaged your scalp and cheekbone, successfully stopping the bleeding," said Frederick. "The damage to your bone structure was nothing more than cracks, and the damage to your nerves nonexistent, so you recovered well. Either you almost completely forgot about it or the Thought Police moved it to the back of your mind, because it took lots of delving to find that, and even then we had to build on it so you knew what was happening."

Winston snapped to attention. "You mean that memory wasn't real?" he spoke quickly.

"It was real," he said. "You just forgot most of the important details."

"If I thought I was getting mauled by a giant rat, how did you know the building fell on me?"

"You'd be surprised at how well one remembers pain. Even almost half a century later, you remembered very well what happened to you. We deduced that only a heavy impact followed by a stab wound could have done what happened to you; rats just don't have the capability."

"But you guessed the rest?" persisted Winston.

"Yes," allowed Frederick, after some contemplation. "We fabricated everything but the pain, and the image of that rat on your face just before you closed your eyes. That was all you remembered, after all."

Winston nodded his consent. "So, who are you all?" he asked, partially relieving the burning curiosity inside him. "Do you work for Goldstein?"

"I'll tell you later," Frederick said airily.

"Oh, why the hell are you acting like a clam?!" said Winston, leaping to his feet.

"Because you're still under the effect of the mind drugs," Frederick said quickly, cutting off Winston before he could start to really get into his stride. Winston closed his mouth, sitting down without realising it.

"How did you build a giant lead-lined bunker?" he said.

Frederick thought for a moment. "We didn't build it: such a task would actually be impossible. No, it was already built, and we moved in. I won't tell you any more while you're still under the effects of the drugs. I don't like talking to a teenager with grey hair. Just wait it out, the answers will come."

Winston screamed, began yelling out in very colourful language, and kicked the bench as hard as he could, causing his varicose vein to flash boiling hot with pain, as well as registering pain in his toes. His screaming stopped short as he felt pain that he hadn't felt since... he couldn't remember what had happened or when, but it was fairly recently, about four months ago. The pain was so intense he couldn't even use his larynx at all, and he fell back onto the floor, eyes wide and unseeing, mouth slightly agape, with his leg convulsing and twitching.

After a minute or so of recovery, Fred said, "Sorry, teenagers like being in control, I forgot. I will tell you what you want to know after supper tonight, okay? Wait until then."

"I thought you said one meal would be enough to flush out the enzymes," said Winston, remembering that detail very well.

"That's if you have one meal, or two in a row. After having a week's worth, it takes two. Of course, you'll still have the other drugs that you've been having all your life. Those will take years to flush away, and even with our treatment it will take several weeks to kill them all, then repair the damage. So: until tonight."

He began to close the door. Winston foresaw a long day where not even the Big Brother literature could keep him interested.

"How will I pass the time?" he said quickly.

Frederick smiled. "In a few minutes I'll bring you an electronic chess set. You will battle it out against a computer opponent. The skill level will remain fixed: you won't think so. I'll also bring some military training games that were once used to prepare new soldiers for the war."

A general annoyance fell away from Winston: he would soon know what was going on and therefore be able to control it, and he would also receive ways of amusing himself. If they got boring, he supposed he could always call Fred to talk to him, seeming as they read his mind. For the first time since he started eating that prole food, he felt relatively calm and at peace. He suddenly realised he wasn't giving any thought to the situation outside: how the Thought Police had probably figured out that the body in his apartment wasn't real, the ultra-secret manhunt that was probably going on, how Big Brother was still out there, doing what the books said were good but what Fred said was evil...

"The Thought Police, and everyone else for that matter, is completely convinced that the body is real," said Frederick.

"Stop leafing through my thoughts, will you?" snarled Winston.

"Sorry," mocked Frederick, incensing him even more. "Everyone thinks you're dead, our highest-ranking spies confirm that. You can truly rest now, Winston: for the first time in a long time, you can completely relax."

Winston's anger left him immediately as he let the man's words mull over in his head. 'First time in a long time' was actually an understatement: aside from when he was a toddler maybe, he had never, ever relaxed completely. A sound snapped him out of it, and he was surprised to discover that the sound was the door closing. A few seconds later, Frederick returned with the chess set. Winston took it, put it on his lap, moved the queen's pawn forward two squares, and waited.


End file.
